I followed her down the hallway again and into the narrow room at the back of the house. It was hot with the sun streaming full through the murky windows and the close air was thick with the usual smells of cat food and animal breath. I glanced out at the double row of cages in the garden, and the cabbage stalks and bread crusts scattered between them. Next to my shin Jack the cat was ripely occupying his favourite armchair. Several other cats prowled or basked in the vicinity.

‘Push him off there,’ Audrey said, but I chose an upright chair at the corner of the table.

‘I’ve been up in Suffolk for a few days,’ I said conversationally, when Audrey had taken the armchair instead and hoisted Jack’s bulk on to her lap. A jet throttled back overhead, and I thought it must have drowned out my words because she made no response. I handed over the box I had carried in with me and said more loudly, ‘I’ve been in Suffolk. I picked masses of these at one of those farm places so I brought some for you.’

In the box were a punnet of strawberries and some broad beans still in their swollen pods. The four days I spent alone in the country had given me plenty more time to think as I walked on the shingle beaches or browsed along the bean rows at the Pick Your Own. I decided that if I came to see Audrey again, in the two days remaining before Jack came back from France, without cross-examining her exactly I might still discover more about Ted and the past. His absence now seemed to swell in my mind with each day that he was gone. I was beginning to believe that I had constructed my own version of our joint history. Maybe I had built up a carapace of resentment that was just beginning to crack open. Angela’s memories of a lovely boy were increasing an already giddy sense of dislodgement.

‘Suffolk?’ Audrey murmured, rather as though I had said Lhasa. She poked her earth-rimmed fingers into the strawberry punnet and fed herself a couple of the fat berries.

‘I went to look up Angela. Do you remember Angela, who was one of Ted’s girlfriends?’

‘Yes,’ she said. Just that, no more.

‘Were you friends? Do you keep in touch with her?’

‘No.’ The negative did for both parts of the question. When I was walking and making plans up in Suffolk I had let myself forget quite how unforthcoming Audrey could be.

‘I had a long talk to her and she told me some things I didn’t know about Ted. Something quite startling, in fact.’

Audrey’s head turned and Jack stopped his rhythmic kneading of the bobbled fabric of her trousers. Two pairs of eyes regarded me flatly.

‘I didn’t know that he had been in prison,’ I said.